‘That’s it,’ said Pamela encouragingly.
As I got out of the car, I was able to continue with my preliminary assessment of Pamela’s appearance. It has been my experience that people of a dramatically different physical ‘type’ to oneself are harder to get along with than those whose flesh one’s own instinctively ‘recognizes’. Pamela’s physical presence immediately struck me as alien; not only in that she was as different from me as was (excluding, obviously, broader possibilities such as having only one leg) possible; but also in that I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be her. In looking at a man, this sensation might well be commonplace; but with a woman the problem becomes somewhat more visceral. It relates to the possession of shared sexual characteristics which, while inviting a superficial assessment of sameness, conceals a deep and, I believe, mutual repulsion. This is not merely the repulsion of a repressed and heterosexual nature for its own kind. In the circumstances I am describing, it is the imagination as well as the body that suspects and rejects its rival, for want of any common ground on which to begin the process of understanding. There was, I could see straight away, no corner or crevice of Pamela’s form that shared its secrets with my own; and as such I suppose I identified her as a threat, or at least a mystery. Perhaps you understand what I mean, but then again perhaps my mistake is not in the way I attempt to explain things. Perhaps, rather, it lies in my attempting to explain things as if they are universal, whereas in fact they are merely the defective impressions of my own mind.
In any case, having made so much of Pamela’s physical appearance, I am bound to describe it now in a more neutral fashion. She was not, in fact, beautiful, although she was of the age — somewhere in her fifties — at which people would say that she must have been very beautiful. I, however, believe that she always looked like that; almost beautiful, that is, or post-beautiful, like the sky at the end of a lovely day, when the sun has disappeared but its aura remains, redolent of things past, a memory more piquant even than the thing remembered. She was quite tall, of slender, almost wiry build, with a skin made leathery by sun, and hair, as I have said, both brittle and profuse. Her face was very attractive, in an extrovert and absolutely unmysterious way, and, not unlike the face of a monkey, was both creased and childish at the same time. This, along with her dynamic and compact form, gave an alluring impression of youth and experience combined, and the whole energetic package was wrapped in a veneer of breeding at once impregnable and careless.
If you have kept in mind the fact that, in appearance, I was as different from Pamela as could be, then you will have gained some impression of me from this description. Unlike Pamela’s, mine were not the sort of looks that slapped one in the face when one encountered them. They did not disrupt, nor seek, attention. One could, in the presence of my looks, get on with the matter to hand; something I have not found to be without its advantages, and have learned, on occasion, to turn to my own.
There is one further subject requiring attention before I can proceed, and that is the matter of the forms of address I have so far employed. A discrepancy may have been observed in my calling the husband Mr Madden, while the wife, before I had even met her, became known to me as Pamela. Unlike many people of my generation, I was brought up always to address adults formally; even, in some cases, after they had implored me to use their first names. My parents fortified this practice, as they did many others, with the belief that beyond these apparently fragile social barricades lay a wilderness of unimaginable degenerations from which good manners offered our only protection. They were even known on occasion bravely to erect a missionary outpost in the savagery beyond, and demand that some over-familiar friend of their children use the more polite form; and were any of us to affront their friends in this manner — even, as I say, if asked to — our presumption was regarded without mercy.
I still, therefore, find it unnatural to use the first name of a person older than me, even though I myself am no longer really young. (I am twenty-nine.) I say this lest it seem that I was Mr-ing and Mrs-ing the Maddens through a sense of my own servility or inferiority to them. This was not at all the case. My free use of the name of Pamela now, however, doubly requires explanation. Suffice it to say that I only adopted it after Mr Madden — Piers, incidentally — had revealed it to be Mrs Madden’s name, and that, moreover, I was using it strictly in my own thoughts. As soon as I was required to, I would verbally address her as Mrs Madden; but being, in those early stages, mentally intrigued only by her role as Mr Madden’s wife, and by his feelings for her, it seemed natural to think of her by the same name that he himself did. Once the habit had been acquired — well, I think I’ve explained myself pretty fully.
To return to the scene in the driveway, my suitcases were retrieved, as they had been stowed, by Mr Madden. Meanwhile, Pamela had taken me by the arm — a gesture of appropriation entirely unnecessary, given that her aura of ownership hung like a great canopy over the very air we were breathing — and was leading me towards the front steps of the house.
‘Piers likes to batten down the hatches,’ she informed me in a conspiratorial tone. ‘So we’ll leave him to it, shall we?’
The skin of her bare arm was dry and very warm on mine. I could smell her perfume and beyond that the more general scent of her, which I was dimly aware was arousing muddled feelings of attraction in me. I had a remote sense of some inner derangement, whose faint call I could hear as if momentarily borne on a favourable wind from a great distance.
‘All right,’ I said.
I glanced behind me and saw that Mr Madden was indeed occupied with locking the car doors one by one, and, from what I could gather, inspecting the battered bodywork. My suitcases stood obediently side by side behind him on the gravel. My connection with him seemed all at once dreamlike, and he was less familiar to me standing there than he had been minutes earlier in the car.
‘Now tell me all about your journey,’ continued Pamela, guiding me through the open front door and into the cool, dark hall. I had an impression of many pictures and mirrors pressed against the walls in the quiet and capacious gloom. Directly ahead a grand polished staircase swept lavishly upwards. The floor shone darkly: it was made, I saw, of great, gleaming flagstones, on which my shoes made a clicking sound as I walked. Pieces of furniture stood frozen in elegant poses about the shadows, slim-ankled chairs with elaborately carved backs, delicate side tables bearing a vase or lamp. A grandfather clock loomed still and straight as a butler at the far end, its throaty, leisurely tick punctuating the cavernous silence. ‘It was so good of you to come at a moment’s notice. I feel terribly guilty. Did you have a dreadful amount to do?’
At that, I guessed that I was being presented with an opportunity to speak. I opened my mouth; but just then there was a furious sound of scuttling and panting up ahead, and all at once a great black bolt of fur and flesh flew at us from the end of the long hall. Taken by surprise, I shrieked as the animal charged my legs, describing crazed circles of excitement around me before plunging his drooling muzzle directly between my thighs.
‘ROY!’ bellowed Pamela. ‘Stop that! Get down!’
The dog was sniffing at me feverishly, his nose rooted deep in the folds of my skirt. Finally, Pamela yanked him back by the collar and administered a sharp slap to his heaving, glossy side.